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Everything in Kamigotchi runs through a Kami, so the first job is owning one. There are three ways in, and one of them has a clock on it.

The Newbie Vendor — use it on day one

A freshly created account can buy one Kami from the Newbie Vendor, at a fair price, but only while the account is less than 24 hours old. The purchase is once per account and the eligibility window does not come back. If you are reading this on your first day, this is the cheapest entry you will get.

What to expect at the vendor:

• The price tracks the market. It is derived from a time-weighted average of recent Kami marketplace sales, with a floor beneath it (0.005 ETH), so you pay roughly what Kamis are going for rather than a made-up sticker price.
• The selection rotates.Three Kamis from the vendor's pool are on display at any moment, and the window advances through the pool on a 48-hour cycle. Sold Kamis leave the pool.
• It is soulbound for 3 days. A Kami bought here cannot be listed, sold into an offer, or unstaked for three days after purchase. Play it, do not flip it.

The other two doors

• The Kami marketplace. An on-chain orderbook where players list Kamis for ETH and make offers on specific Kamis or on the collection as a whole. This is where you go when you want a particular stat spread rather than whatever is on display.
• The gacha. Spend a Gacha Ticket to mint a random Kami out of the pool. Tickets are sold at the auction for Musu, so this door opens up once you are earning in-game rather than spending ETH.

Harvesting is the engine of the whole game: you park a Kami on a node, it accrues Musu over time, and you collect. Three things decide whether that first sit goes well.

Match the node to your Kami's affinities

Every Kami has a body affinity and a hand affinity; every node has an affinity too. Match both and your harvest rate is double what a neutral pairing earns. Mismatch both and you are earning about two thirds of par. Nothing else you can do on day one comes close to that as a multiplier — it is free, and it is one click of thought before you start.

The World Map lists every node with its affinity, and Harvesting has the full matching table.

Starter nodes are quieter than the rest

Some nodes carry a maximum Kami level for harvesting there — a common cap is level 15. That is a ceiling, not a floor: high-level Kamis are locked out of those nodes entirely, which is why early ground is relatively calm. Enjoy it while you are under the cap.

The harvest costs health, and your health caps the payout

Collecting Musu inflicts strain — health drains in proportion to what you harvest, and higher Harmony makes each Musu cheaper. This produces the single most important rule of your first week:

Also expect to wait between actions: after starting, collecting, stopping, or using an item, a Kami is on a 3-minute cooldown and cannot act again until it clears.

Kamigotchi has player-versus-player combat, but it is much narrower than the phrase suggests, and understanding the narrowness is the whole defense.

• You can only be liquidated while harvesting, and only by a Kami that is harvesting the same node as yours. There is no ambush on the road, no attacking a Kami sitting at home.
• A rested, healthy Kami is never killable.A resting Kami is not a legal target at all, and a harvesting one at full health cannot be killed on stats alone. It only becomes killable once its health has fallen below a threshold that sits at a fraction of its maximum — a fraction that rises the bigger the attacker's affinity advantage over it.
• Low health plus a fat uncollected bounty is the signature predators hunt for. The two together are what makes you worth the attempt: the low health lets the kill land, and the uncollected pile is the prize.

Death is recoverable but not cheap when you are starting out. A dead Kami comes back either through a revive item or by spending Onyx Shards — 33 of them, which restores 33 health rather than a full bar. Early on that is a real setback; later it is a line item. The Liquidations page has the exact threshold math if you want to know precisely how much margin you are carrying.

The harvest-rest cycle is the rhythm of the early game, and its bottleneck is not the harvesting — it is the recovery.

Resting heals slowly. Recovery runs in hours, not minutes: a low-Harmony Kami needs the better part of three hours to refill a small health bar, and a bigger bar takes proportionally longer. Healing happens on its own whether or not you are online, but it happens at its own pace.

Food is how you buy that time back. Feeding restores health, which both rescues a Kami that is running low and raises the ceiling on what the current sit can bank.

Once the loop is running, you need something to point it at. In rough order of usefulness:

• Quests.The fastest source of early items and experience, and the game's built-in tutorial for systems you have not met. Browse the whole chain on the Quest Database.
• Levels, which you get for free. Every Musu a Kami collects is also a point of experience for it. Earning and leveling are the same act — there is no separate grind, and a Kami that farms is a Kami that improves.
• The level-16 skill pick. This is the first build moment that really matters: fifteen points into a single tree unlocks its Tier 3 skills, and the sixteenth buys one of three mutually exclusive options. You choose one and lock out the others, and that choice is what makes your Kami a particular kind of Kami. The costs and the trees are on Leveling & XP.
• Trading. Kamis change hands on the on-chain orderbook; items change hands through direct player trades. Those trades carry a delivery fee — which is waived entirely if you are standing in Room 66, the Trade Room. See Economy for the fee structure.

After the first week the game stops being about mechanics and starts being about other players. There are farmers who optimize long untouched sits for a handful of transactions a day, farmers who feed on a schedule and run their Kamis around the clock, tanks built so high that nobody can profitably touch them, and predators who make their living on other people's uncollected bounty. There is quiet ground and there is ground worth fighting over, and the difference is a fact about the population rather than about the nodes.

None of that is in the rules. It is in Playing Well — the doctrine section, which describes what players have actually settled on, and which carries a date because it will change.

Kamigotchi rewards attention, and not everybody has attention to give. Community automation services exist that run your Kamis for you — starting, collecting and feeding on your behalf — and charge for it as a tax on the harvests they start. One such service is kamibots.xyz.

Whether that trade is worth making is covered alongside the other cost lines on Choosing ground and counting costs.